The buzz has been off the charts for “The Substance” following its May world premiere at the 77th Cannes Film Festival where it won the award for Best Screenplay. Since then it has only gained momentum, recently showing at the Toronto Independent Film Festival where it took home one of the People’s Choice awards. Now […]
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Adapting a chronicle of Amsterdam Holocaust victims’ stories, McQueen does a one-note meditation on past and present.
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I loved The Substance for its audacity, confrontational nature, indelible performances and wicked sense of humor. It’s an unforgettably wild ride of excess. Recommended.
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Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of…
The Red Sea Makes Me Wanna Cry is set between Berlin and a small port town overlooking the Red Sea, with a rather complicated history
One feels that thinking on a film by the Coen brothers, especially a comedy, is a fruitless exercise. Those guys design their work in such a way that it’s not merely immune to navel-gazing, it actually mocks the navel-gazers. And bless their hearts for it. As David Bazan has sung: You’re so creative With your…
What’s an out of work clown to do? Louison (played by Dominique Pinon) didn’t lose his job due to a lack of charm, he has that in abundance. Unfortunately his life took an unexpected turn with the death of his performing partner. The truth to be told, his partner didn’t simply die, he was…
Right from the first scene in Bergman Island, it is apparent that this is a movie made with a very particular audience in mind. You can tell that it will never crossover into pop culture or even into the conversations of casual movie fans, like a lot of indies playing in the festival circuit, do.…
MUHAMMED NOUSHAD reviews Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul. Turkish music is irresistibly intoxicating. The more you listen to it, the more it binds you inside. Once you begin to indulge in its soothing pleasure, it engages you to endless entrapment. Here, modernity cohabits with tradition as in the historic city…
This is the first post in The Cinematic Mr. Ripley, a series for the MovieThoughts category of my blog that considers moral themes in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels and the film adaptations of those books. This post looks at Purple Noon, the 1960 French adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Alain Delon. It…
Gliding almost without speech down the dawn streets of a wet Paris winter, these men in trench coats and fedoras perform a ballet of crime, hoping to win and fearing to die. Some are cops and some are robbers. To smoke for them is as natural as breathing. They use guns, lies, clout, greed and nerve with the skill of a magician who no longer even thinks about the cards. They share a code of honor which is not about what side of the law they are on, but about how a man must behave to win the respect of those few others who understand the code.
No monsters seem more ghastly or disturbing in the films of David Cronenberg than his depiction of the rich.
Leyla, a woman in her late 40s, decides to move to Istanbul after working for several years in the German adult film industry. Her opportunist producer ex-boyfriend Yılmaz takes advantage of her drug addiction to persuade her to take part in one last film.
“A genuine revelation. We may finally have an heir to Kubrick.” – LA Weekly “A grand statement on what it means to be a human being.” – Blankprojecter “It’s simply one of the most unique, original and mind-blowing movies you’ll see in a theatre all year.” – Playlist It’s rare to find a movie that has been…
Image Credit: Wild Bunch (spoiler free) Like any Gaspar Noé film, Vortex opens with its end credits. At the tail end of it, a text appears on the screen and says: “À tous ceux dont le cerveau se décomposera avant le coeur.” Translating to “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.” There’s…
Paul Mescal as Calum Paterson Frankie Corio as Sophie Paterson Director: Charlotte Wells Twenty years after their last holiday at a fading vacation resort, Sophie reflects on the rare time spent with her loving and idealistic father Calum. At 11-years-old, as the world of adolescence creeps into Sophie’s view, Calum struggles…
At four reels, THE PILGRIM isn’t quite a short and doesn’t seem quite a feature, but the IMDb classes it as one. Excitingly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it, not all the way through. Chaplin is recycling the escaped convict routine from THE ADVENTURER and having another go at the mistaken identity gag from […]
The Sunday Intertitle: Pilgrim Versus the World
The notion that a first-time filmmaker could blend the rugged, depressive existence of scrappy children struggling to get by in one of Glasgow’s most oppressive neighborhoods with a bizarre dream sequence that includes a mouse tied to a balloon flying to the moon and becoming part of a mouse colony is just as staggering today […]
‘Ratcatcher’: Trauma Never Fades
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 9 out of 10. Oh – hello there. The following tale of celebrity fetishisation and psychotic delusions is true. And by true, I mean false. Welcome, to The King of Comedy. I’d just like to make this clear: I love this film. And by love, I do not mean hate. In every sense […]
Is The King of Comedy Scorsese’s Best Film? No – It’s Simply The Best Film
Avast, landlubbers, today’s movie selection deals with the rarely-seen topic of sea monsters! But before you lay out your harpoons and start double-tracking the vocals on your sea-shanties, this is a Spanish art-film about sea-monsters on the Mubi channel, so don’t expect 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea shenanigans. Lois Patiño’s film feels like what would […]
